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‘Of course it does.’
‘Didn’t you realise,’ he questioned softly, ‘that coming back to Milmouth would bring all those memories back? What did you think it was going to be like, Shelley?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t stop to think. But even if I had I think I would have come anyway. I can’t keep running away from the repercussions of what I did. It’s time I faced up to them and let them go. Maybe it’s time to bury the past, Drew—once and for all.’
‘And how are you going to do that?’
‘By accepting that I probably hastened my mother’s death…’ Her breath caught in her throat. ‘She was heart-broken by what I did—’
‘No, Shelley!’ he put in fiercely. ‘There are plenty of things you can beat yourself up about—but that isn’t one of them. Your mother’s death was premature, yes, but natural—the doctors all said so!’
‘But I didn’t come and see her for a year!’ she moaned. ‘And when I did it was too late—she was lying in a coma and couldn’t hear me!’
‘You couldn’t have predicted that would happen!’ he argued. ‘I went away from home for three years, remember? Something similar could have happened to me, but it didn’t. You were just unlucky.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hey!’ he said softly.
She looked up at him. ‘What?’
‘Your mother got over your defection, you know, Shelley.’ His smile was almost gentle. ‘Mothers always do—once they realise they can’t plot out their children’s lives for them.’
‘You can’t know that!’
‘Yes, I can—because she told me.’
‘Did she? Really?’
‘Really,’ he nodded.
‘Oh.’ Some of the burden lifted from her shoulders. ‘I’m still sorry for what happened,’ she said simply. ‘And for the way it happened.’
He gave a short laugh. ‘Me, too.’
‘I should have—’
‘Shh.’ He shook his head and the candlelight emphasised the honeyed gleam which tipped each dark strand. ‘We can’t change anything by wishing we’d behaved any differently. We just have to deal with what really happened.’
‘Oh, Drew!’
He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Eat your soup, Shelley,’ was all he said.
He didn’t say another thing as Shelley began to steadily eat her soup with the air of someone who had only just realised what hunger meant. Words would distract her, and she didn’t need any more distractions, not at the moment. Right now she needed to eat.
He didn’t know what he had expected to feel about her. Over the years he had anticipated many reactions when he saw her again. If he saw her again. He had never been able to count on that, despite his own gut feeling, despite what her mother had once said to him. His favourite response to her had been one of complete indifference, but even in his most furious moments of denial he had known that one was a non-starter.
His imagination had given her and the Italian at least one child together. And an idyllic relationship—in the way that other people’s relationships always looked idyllic. Frustration and hurt pride had subsided over the years, until they could be filed away as experience. He had convinced himself that he was well rid of the bitch.
Yet life was never that simple. Something inside him had flared when he had seen her today on the beach, her fingers bare of rings. So was that simply lust? Fuelled by absence and the fact that he had never tasted her body in the way which had haunted his dreams for as long as he could remember?
‘Oh, that was good!’
He watched as she finished the soup and put her spoon down, looking up at him with a glowing face which made her look about sixteen years old. Or seventeen…
‘You haven’t even touched yours,’ she observed.
‘No.’ He didn’t want it. He had lost his appetite. Or rather he’d lost that particular appetite. Another—sharper and much more intense—was raging inside him like a wild storm right now. ‘It’s grown cold. I think I’ll skip.’
Shelley nodded and ate some bread, and he watched while the life and the colour came back into her cheeks.
‘So tell me about Milmouth,’ she said. Anything to distract him, to stop him from staring at her like that. Because she was feeling the strongest urge to push back her chair and grab him by the hand and pull him to his feet and… ‘Has it—er—changed at all?’
He smiled. ‘What’s this? Distraction technique?’
‘It’s called making conversation!’ she snapped, thinking how perceptive he was.
